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Adobe Flash Player 11 Linux Performance

08-09-2011, 04:10 PM

Phoronix: Adobe Flash Player 11 Linux Performance

In the middle of July, Adobe released the first Flash Player 11 beta, which had updated the Linux version too. The Flash Player 11 release notably incorporated native 64-bit support, once again, after the earlier "Square" 64-bit beta had lagged behind in terms of updates. Shortly following the Flash Player 11 Beta 1 release I had carried out some Linux benchmarks, but those results never seemed to make it out the door. Here are those results for anyone interested in seeing how the CPU usage and system power consumption differ between Flash 11 with and without VDPAU rendering and then against the open-source Gnash Flash Player.

Probably the reason for higher power consumption is that the Crash player doesn't use a hardware display method (VDPAU or OpenGL) to actually display the frames. This means that the CPU must copy them to system RAM, do whatever compositing it wants to do, and then copy the frame back to the GPU. This slows it down, increases CPU usage, and causes tearing.

With flash 11 no difference whatsoever: CPU between 80-100% in normal mode and when putting to fullscreen the screen freezes often for several seconds (!!) and exiting fullscreen takes about 10 seconds.

Now I use 10.3.181.34 with nspluginwrapper and it is much better. Without the entries in mms.cfg it is really bad, but fullscreen with them is actually really good in terms of cpu usage. Not as good as with a native player, of course, but that's the "best" videoplaying with flash I have ever seen.
That said, that often doesn't apply to sites other than youtube. On videohosters like videobb even a paused flash video will produce ~80% cpu usage.

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one very important question is how the 64 bit flash compares to 32 bit flash on the same hardware.

I upgraded to the 64 bit flash sometime last month, and it seemed to be smoother than the 32 bit version on my overloaded system, but how much of that is real improvement and how much is the placebo effect I don't know :-)

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I'd like to see a comparison between YouTube's Flash player and YouTube's HTML5 player in Firefox. Yes, it will be VP8 and Vorbis in the HTML5 player as opposed to H.264 and AAC so it's not strictly an apples to apples comparison, but it would nevertheless be interesting to see how different the HTML5 player is in CPU usage and power draw.

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Yeah, I've noticed the plugin is a bit buggier than previous versions. To be expected with a pre-release version, but it is pretty bad. Some content doesn't play at all, and most interactive content plays with bugs in rendering.

It's definitely more efficient, though. Videos that used to slow down or skip when switching to full-screen will now usually play smoothly during the transition, and some games which were slow now play better.

(^^^ I think this was with 11 beta 1, not sure...)

It'd be nice if there was a newer version of Lightspark available for Fedora, so I could test it. I know it's not on par with Adobe's Flash plugin, but it'd work well enough for my limited usage.